Tag: Law

For progressives, the question on the health care battle going forward is not whether they have a right to be angry but whether they can direct their fury toward constructive ends. This column has been updated by the author.

There was a nice, albeit fleeting, moment in the spring when hospitals, doctors, drug companies and insurers came together at the White House, pledging to do their part to get health care costs under control.

What have you been doing all weekend? If the answer isn’t reading about Fox’s goofy polls, the man who hid 44 lizards in his pants and great moments in Orwellandia, hop on past the jump for the weekend list and catch up.

Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday, President Barack Obama acknowledged the controversy of his award, as “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.” He spoke of one of those wars, Afghanistan, in terms of self-defense and shared his thoughts on the concept of “just war.” (full remarks inside)

The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Most mobile phones have tiny GPS chips that do things like give directions or route your call to the right city when you dial 911. It turns out that law enforcement can ask phone companies for GPS info that reveals exactly where a phone owner is, and, according to a disturbing piece of audio making the rounds, the cops asked Sprint-Nextell for the locations of customers 8 million times in one year. (continued and video)

Sherrod Brown and other progressive senators held a meeting Monday night with Harry Reid to let the majority leader know they don’t intend to give up any more of an already weakened public option. (continued)

The gossipy schoolchildren who make up Washington’s power elite have sunk their claws into White House counsel Greg Craig. The president’s top lawyer has had one of the toughest jobs in the building—reversing George W. Bush’s torture policies, finding a Supreme Court justice and vetting some of the nation’s most complex legislation—and he has the scars to prove it.

Executing people is expensive. A new report by the Death Penalty Information Center says California is spending more than 10 times as much on capital punishment—$137 million a year—as it would on an alternative life-without-parole system. New York and New Jersey repealed ...

The lousy economy has driven some Californians into the marijuana industry, which is doing a lot better than, say, construction. According to this Miller-McCune profile, California will grow an estimated $15 billion worth of weed in 2009, a good portion of it in the backyards and basements of amateurs and newcomers.

The Justice Department is officially going to quit harshing the mellow of the 13 states that have medical marijuana laws on the books. Dispensaries and patients will no longer have to worry about federal raids—unless they’re “drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law.”

Keith Bardwell, a Louisiana justice of the peace, may be in hot water for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple. “I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell says, because he thinks it’s cruel to the children produced by such unions.

Italy’s colorful prime minister is in a heap of legal trouble now that the country’s high court has stripped him of immunity. Despite facing charges of corruption, bribery, tax evasion and fraud, Silvio Berlusconi stayed in character, saying, “The trials against me are a farce. Viva Italia and Viva Berlusconi!”

The nation’s capital is likely to approve a law legalizing gay marriage, much to the chagrin of the less tolerant politicians who work there. The city’s congressional overlords have the power to overturn the measure, but even opponents of gay marriage don’t expect that to happen.

Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the Puritan scolds definitely have a point.

After doing prison time for dog fighting, he played Sunday in his first regular-season game in almost three years. But his re-emergence in the NFL has revived questions that arose when the scandal broke. And for one journalist, the issue was personal.

It is puzzling that obituary notices of Irving Kristol obviously intended to be positive designate him the “Godfather” of neoconservatism. Likening this group of thinkers and writers to a gang of Mafiosi may or may not be accurate; it is certainly not flattering.

How about that Eric Holder? The Justice Department plans to make it harder for the government to hide behind “national security” in legal cases—a process that has been abused since a highly flawed Supreme Court decision first allowed wide latitude in such matters.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski proposed two rules Monday that would preserve the Internet’s status quo of openness and equality. If the rules are adopted, Internet service providers—including mobile carriers—would be barred from restricting or blocking access to “lawful” content.